Sunday, November 13, 2011

Photoshop

So hi everyone!

Yeah I know, it's been months, but I'm gonna give this another try, let the graphic design online training begin. :)

So I'm gonna start this off by talking about the first steps you need to take to get photoshop started. :)

So Photoshop is a Graphic editing program, which allows you to alter/tamper with photos.

The first step in using photoshop is actually owning your very own photoshop, there are many different version of photoshop, like CS2,3,4,5 Element 8 and downwards, the list goes on.

Photoshop costs money and the more expensive the version is the more features it's packed with.

So whom would benefit from the extra features?

Well those would be the people who are actually gonna be working with the extra features.

Take for an example if a hobby photgrapher wants to touch up his photos and nothing more then he can easily get by with Element 7, while a graphics Designer working for a company or for hire would have to have the CS5.

So which version you buy depends on how your gonna be using it.

So once you have Photoshop legally installed the first thing you do is open up the program.

Now what you see after you launch the program depends on what version you have, for example in Photoshop 7 I am presented with a couple of options to chose from. Well for what I want to do, create a piece of art, I click Create.

Now I want to get up a empty space for me to work on, so I click File which can be found on the toolsbar at the top of the organizer, from there I go to New then Blank File, now once I've done that a new window opens up called "Editor", were gonna be using that window to make our images. :)
So the first thing we do is set the size off our images. So lets say I want my images to be 300x200 then I write 300 as the width and 200 as Height. A good rule of thump when creating something like a banner in photoshop is to make the width larger then the height.


Now congratulations you have your work space. So now your ready to start working on your image.

What you do next is up to what you want your end result to be.
So a little about the things you see around you

To the left you have all your tools, lined up, the must know tools for beginners would be:

The Eraser, Pen Tool, Type Tool, Smudge Tool and Paint Bucket tool.

Now under this you'll see two colours, probably black and white, note, the colour you have on top is the colour your working with. Let say the colour Blue is on top of white then that means that when I input text or draw something with the Pen tool then it's gonna be in the colour blue.

So you may ask what it the purpose of the colour underneath, well, when using the gradient tool and want to gradient between two colours you use that colour underneath to set the colour that you want the colour on top to gradient with/blend with..


To  your wright you'll see some effect and one of the most important things to learn about when working with Photoshop, the Layer Palette. Using the layers palette you can input a lot of effects and you can easily remove/edit a layer later on if you don't like that effect anymore.

So when adding something to your project make sure each edit or step has it's own layer, to create a new layer you hit the Create a New Layer button which can be found as the first button in the layer palette.

You can adjust the opacity of each layer to along with changing the way the layer appears over it's background.

So say you wanna open up a Images from your computer to work with then simply click File, then hit Open and locate your images and select it, once it has opened you can start editing it.

So like mentioned each Photoshop launches differently, like for example in CS4 you can set the size of your project right away instead of having to select Create and then having to go trough the Organizer..


So this was how to start up Photoshop and how to start a new project. I know people have found themselves a bit lost when using Photoshop for the first time, so I hope you found this to be useful and I will be going into more details on how each feature works and how you can use it for best results and how to upload brushes and downloaded font types. :)


So if you have any questions about what to do next then please let me know so the next tutorial I make can answer your question. Also I will be using screen shots in my tutorials, so if you check back on this tutorial in a couple of days I will have added in screen shots. ;D

1 comment:

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